“We Can Engineer It”: Trump Associate Bragged About Using Deal with Putin to Help Win Election

Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump Jr., listen during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York, January 11, 2017.

By Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images.

Throughout his campaign for president, Donald Trump repeatedly denied having anything to do with Russia. “I have nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do, I never met Putin, I have nothing to do with Russia whatsoever,” he said during an interview in July 2016. He was even more emphatic on Twitter: “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.” It was obvious, relatively early on, that this wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., bragged in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” And if the Trump Organization didn’t have actual investments inside Russia, it’s not because they didn’t try.

As The Washington Postreported on Sunday, the Trump Organization was actively pursuing real-estate opportunities in Russia in late 2015 and early 2016 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The project was spearheaded by Russian-born developer and longtime Trump associate Felix Sater (who helped build Trump SoHo) and Michael Cohen, an executive vice president at the Trump Organization and the president’s longtime personal attorney. The deal never came to fruition. But, as the Post reports, citing newly surfaced records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers and several people familiar with the proposal, negotiations were ongoing throughout much of Trump’s presidential campaign:

As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.

The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating—both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.

Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.

(The White House declined to comment while Sater did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.)

On Monday, The New York Times followed up on the Post report, releasing portions of the e-mail exchanges between Sater and Cohen, which the Trump Organization turned over to Congressional investigators . “I arranged for Ivanka [Trump] to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote in an e-mail to Cohen on November 3, 2015, the Times reports. “I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this,” he continued.

“Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer
it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”

There is no evidence that Sater fulfilled the promises he outlined in his correspondence. “He has sometimes used colorful language,” Cohen said in a statement to the Times, describing Sater as “prone to ‘salesmanship.’” Cohen added that he “ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.” In a statement, Ivanka Trump said she received “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin” but that she never met Putin during the 2006 trip to which Sater alluded. She did not clarify whether she sat in the Russian president’s chair.

According to individuals briefed on the deal who spoke with the Post, the Trump Tower Moscow deal began in earnest in September 2015 only to be abandoned in January 2016, just prior to the start of the Republican primaries but after the New York real-estate company signed a letter of intent with investors. Earlier this month, Sater confirmed the deal to Talking Points Memo, but said Trump’s candidacy derailed the Moscow plans. “Once the campaign was really going-going, it was obvious there were going to be no deals internationally,” Sater said. “We were still working on it, doing something with it, November-December.”

In a subsequent article on Monday, the Post reported that Cohen e-mailed Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s personal assistant, in an attempt to reboot the stalled development deal, according to e-mails provided to congressional investigators. Per the Post:

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower - Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to a person familiar with the email. “Without getting into lengthy specifics. the communication between our two sides has stalled.”

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

In a statement to the Post, Cohen downplayed the importance of the deal as “simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.” He also dismissed the idea that it was in any way tied to Trump’s presidential bid, telling Congress in a statement Monday, “The decision to pursue the proposal initially, and later to abandon it were unrelated to the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign.” He added that he only sent the e-mail to Peskov at the urging of Sater and does not remember receiving a response. But he did also note that he discussed the Trump Tower Moscow deal with Trump on three occasions and said the president signed the letter of intent in 2015, according to an ABC News report.

The revelation that the Trump Organization reportedly sought a massive commercial real-estate deal in Moscow during the campaign may help explain why Trump was so passionate about thawing relations between the United States and Russia. Trump praised Putin on several occasions while his real-estate company was reportedly seeking the Moscow deal. During an interview with Morning Joe on December 18, 2015, Trump dismissed the allegations that Putin killed journalists who criticized him while simultaneously taking a swipe at Barack Obama. “He’s running his country and at least he is a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump told host Joe Scarborough. He defended the Russian president again, two days later, in an interview with ABC’s Meet the Press.

The e-mails also belie repeated denials by both Trump and his legal team that he had any business interests in Russia. In August 2016, Alan Garten the general counsel of the Trump Organization, told Politico that the company was not seeking deals in Russia and said Sater was not advising the real-estate company. Both statements may have been true at the time, but not several months earlier. (In a statement to the Times on Monday, the Trump Organization wrote, “To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia.”)

The Post report is the latest in a string of recent revelations that have thrown light on Trump’s murky relationship with Russia and Russian business interests. Last week, CNN reported that Rick Dearborn, a former Trump campaign adviser who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, sent an e-mail informing senior Trump campaign staffers that an individual sought to arrange a meeting between the presidential candidate and Russian President Vladimir Putin. An earlier report revealed that a low-level Trump campaign staffer, George Papadopoulous, also tried to arrange a similar meeting. Both stories follow Trump Jr.’s admission last month that he, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower last summer after being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to assist their campaign.

Cohen and Sater have been recurring figures in the Russian melodrama currently roiling Capitol Hill. In February, The New York Timesreported that Cohen and Sater met with Andrii Artemenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, to discuss a proposal outlining how Trump could lift U.S. sanctions against Moscow. According to the Times, Cohen told the outlet that he hand-delivered the “peace plan” to then National Security Adviser Mike Flynn. (Cohen later denied that he delivered it to the former general.)

Sater, who pleaded guilty for his involvement in a Mafia-related stock manipulation scheme in 1998, has also worked closely with Trump on a number of real-estate deals in the past, including the controversial Trump SoHo development. He has also been among the president’s most earnest defenders, though the White House might have preferred he stay quiet. “The next three years of hearings about Trump and Russia will yield absolutely nothing. I know the man, they didn’t collude,” he toldNew York magazine in an interview earlier this month. “Did a bunch of meetings happen? Absolutely. The people on the Trump team who had any access to the Russians wanted to be first in and be the guys that ran the whole détente thing. Michael Flynn wanted to be the détente guy, and then [Paul] Manafort, I’m sure, wanted to be the détente guy. Shit, I wanted to be the détente guy, why not? But was it really a conspiracy between Putin and Donald to get him elected? A little bit of a stretch.”